The federal government is likely to award around 80 companies a spot on a massive contracting system approving certain IT companies to sell to government.

Alliant 2, known as a “Government-Wide Acquisition Contract,” is managed by the General Services Administration. Last month, GSA made awards on its larger $50 billion IT GWAC, with a special emphasis on companies selling emerging technology such as artificial intelligence.

The Alliant 2 small business contracts are worth up to $15 billion, with a five-year base and five-year extension option. GSA on Thursday published a pre-award list of businesses likely to get a spot.

The Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC), the state of Georgia’s technology incubator, is now accepting applications from high-growth technology startups for its upcoming Dec. 4, 2017 Venture Showcase Roadtrip to New York City.

The application period is open from Oct. 2 through 5 p.m. on Oct. 20, and any Georgia-headquartered technology company raising a Series A round or higher is eligible. The 10 selected companies will be notified Oct. 27 after the selection committee has reviewed all applicants.

Those interested in applying should send a one-page executive summary to ATDC Assistant Director Jane McCracken at jane@atdc.org.

The initiative is an offshoot of the ATDC’s Investor Connect program, and allows funders — from angels to venture capitalists and other later-stage investors — to network with the highly vetted, market disruptive companies in ATDC’s Signature and Accelerate portfolios.

David Thomas, founder and CEO of Evident, an ATDC Signature portfolio company.

“The Venture Showcase Roadtrip introduces investors to a carefully curated group of companies to foster meaningful and targeted conversations and connections, as well as give the venture firms a sense of the caliber of technology startups in Georgia,” McCracken said. “Our inaugural roadtrip to the West Coast earlier this year is a perfect example of the kinds of connections we facilitate.”

In that trip to San Francisco, 11 Georgia companies met with a group of Silicon Valley venture capitalists. Evident, an ATDC Signature portfolio company, met with New Enterprise Associates (NEA). That initial connection resulted in NEA becoming the lead investor in Evident’s recent $8.8 million Series A round.

“The San Francisco trip was an important milestone for our company. The ATDC name got us in front of an extremely selective and highly sought after group of venture capitalists eager to meet quality, disruptive companies,” said David Thomas, Evident’s founder and CEO. “It facilitated a critically important series of initial meetings that ultimately led to our successful Series A.”

ABOUT ATDC:

The Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC), a program of the Georgia Institute of Technology, is the state of Georgia’s technology startup incubator. Founded in 1980 by the Georgia General Assembly which funds it each year, ATDC’s mission is to work with entrepreneurs in Georgia to help them learn, launch, scale, and succeed in the creation of viable, disruptive technology companies. Since its founding, ATDC has grown to become one of the longest running and most successful university-affiliated incubators in the United States, with its graduate startup companies raising $3 billion in investment financing and generating more than $12 billion in revenue in the state of Georgia. To learn more, visit atdc.org.

Health Information Technology (IT) is one of the fastest-growing fields in the IT industry, in part due to a spurt of government technology modernization initiatives. After seeing skyrocketing demand across federal government agencies for the past several years, the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) decided to prioritize Health IT as its own separate category within GSA Schedule 70 by establishing Health IT Special Item Number (SIN) 132-56.

The new SIN was officially established on August 1, 2016. It is the first SIN of its kind directly correlated to Health IT in compliance with the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR).

This new SIN category will give Health IT companies access to business with federal government agencies including the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Defense Health Agency (a joint integrated Combat Support Agency that enables the U.S Army, U.S. Navy, and U.S. Air Force medical services to provide a medically ready force and ready medical force to Combatant Commands in both peacetime and wartime). As military and civilian healthcare reforms take effect, GSA expects these agencies’ demand to continue to grow.

Part of the justification for establishing a separate category is that Health IT is truly different — in that companies involved in the Health IT industry require very specific skillsets and have to comply with various healthcare security standards, including the Privacy Act of 1974, Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA).

A trade group representing some of the largest IT companies is calling for a collaborative approach among the new Congress, the Trump administration and the tech industry.

In a blog post explaining the tech industry’s legislation priorities for the 115th Congress, the Information Technology Industry Council outlined four priority areas that share commonalities with President-elect Donald Trump’s agenda. Chief among them is reforming acquisition and procurement, the blog states.

“Federal agencies spend approximately 80 percent of their total technology budget on maintaining outdated legacy computer systems,” the blog states. “Congress should reform the way the federal government procures and utilizes technology to ensure all government users keep pace with innovation and modern solutions.”

When the Obama administration’s 2017 budget was released in February, it showed that IT spending was set to grow 1.8 percent, up to $89.9 billion over last year’s total, with about $51.3 billion designated for civilian agencies.

This was positive news for the defense and tech contractors that serve the federal government, but the uptick may not be a sign of things to come. According to the analysts at Deltek, federal IT spending will actually decline over the next five years as agencies attempt to modernize aging IT infrastructure and reduce duplicative technologies and investments.

After years of gestation, a final rule was promulgated May 16, 2016 to mandate minimum cyber defenses for companies that do government business. This Federal Acquisition Regulations rule – “Basic Safeguarding of Contractor Information Systems” 81 Fed. Reg. 30439 – seeks to protect the confidentiality and integrity of federal contract information (FCI) that resides in or transits through any contractor information system.

Why this rule?

Agencies are required by the Federal Information Security Modernization Act (FISMA) to protect federal information. The obligation extends to nonpublic information provided by the federal government to its contractors. Unauthorized cyber extraction of federal information has caused genuine injury to national interests. Using this new FAR provision, every federal agency now will require minimum cyber protection for FCI.

What is federal contract information?

FCI is defined as nonpublic information that is “provided for or generated for the government” under a contract to “develop or deliver a product or service to the government, but not including information provided to the public or simple transactional information. The new rule protects “information systems” rather than carefully defined information types, however. If a contractor processes stores or transmits any FCI, its information system becomes subject to minimum enumerated safeguards. Where a contractor information system hosts FCI and other, non-federal information, the rule applies to the whole system.

On December 30, 2015, the Department of Defense (DoD) issued a Second Interim Rule amending its “Network Penetration Reporting and Contracting for Cloud Services” Interim Rule and giving contractors until December 31, 2017 to implement the NIST SP 800-171 security controls required by DFARS 252.204-7012.

Click on image above to see a copy of NIST publication 800-171.

As noted in a previous post, DoD has already issued a class deviation giving covered contractors up to nine (9) months (from the date of contract award or modification incorporating the new clause(s)) to satisfy the requirement for “multifactor authentication for local and network access” found in Section 3.5.3 of NIST SP 800-171. This current revision appears responsive to significant concerns raised by industry about compliance with the remaining safeguarding requirements imposed overnight on contractors on August 26, 2015.

In the Federal Register notice, DoD states that it is granting additional time “for contractors to assess their information systems and to set forth an economically efficient strategy to implement the new security requirements at a pace that fits within normal information technology lifecycle timelines.”

Conventional wisdom says you don’t use a credit card for incidental purchases. However, the team at 18F ran an experiment to see if they could buy work on open source code using a credit card — without running afoul of the federal acquisition regulation — and got exactly what they needed for just a dollar.

On Oct. 26, 18F officials posted an open competition to GitHub to incorporate data from IT Schedule 70 into the CALC tool, which tracks pricing for specific labor categories on awarded federal contracts. The competition was structured as a reverse-auction open to contractors registered with SAM.gov, with a starting bid of $3,499, just below the threshold for credit card purchases.

The Obama administration has ambitious plans to embed a full-scale digital-service team within each agency to help overhaul the way government delivers IT projects.

But the teams won’t do it alone.

Officials at the General Services Administration (GSA) and its in-house digital shop 18F are now sending a message to the traditional contracting industry: We need your help, too.

That was the takeaway from the February 3, 2015 joint GSA-18F industry day where officials and industry representatives mulled over plans for a new agile-only contracting vehicle that will eventually help agencies purchase services specifically from companies that specialize in quick-turnaround software deployments

18F has been doing its part over the past year to help agencies revamp citizen-facing services. All told, the office has agreements with about 18 agencies to perform development and design work, officials said.

The relatively small shop — its staff size currently hovers around 100 — has faced “explosive” demand for its services and can’t keep up, said Greg Godbout, 18F’s executive director.

Contractors with their eyes on hot-button issues such as cybersecurity legislation, information technology (IT) acquisition reform, and strategic sourcing policy have plenty to consider in the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) and a recent policy memorandum issued by Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Administrator Anne Rung. Some key items to consider:

Cybersecurity: In 2015, the Department of Defense must issue rules requiring “operationally critical contractors” to report cyber incidents in their network and information systems.

IT Acquisition Reform: Under the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA), Chief Information Officers in Federal agencies will take key roles in the acquisition process, which could affect the nature of IT-related acquisitions for years to come. FITARA also sharpens the Government’s FOCUS on strategic sourcing.

Strategic Sourcing and Category Management: In an initiative that complements strategic sourcing, OMB has established “category management” as a key Federal acquisition strategy, which will foster Government-wide purchasing of items, such as IT hardware and software, by one source instead of through multiple agencies.

For a broad array of contractors, those “operationally critical contractors” working with the DoD, providers of IT-related supplies and services, and those supplying “categories” of supplies throughout the Federal government, these changes will affect their daily operations and how they market and sell to their Federal customers in 2015 and beyond.